


Intervention

by orphan_account



Category: AFI
Genre: Alternate Universe, Broken Heart, Death, First Love, M/M, Moving, Tattoos, Writing, college angst, hometown angst, mortality anxiety, return to Ukiah, straightedge angst, what the fuck am I gonna do with my life anxiety
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-06
Updated: 2013-01-06
Packaged: 2017-11-23 21:17:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/626616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I can taste your fear, It’s gonna lift you up and take you out of here. <br/>And when you finally disappear, we’ll just say that you were never here.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Intervention

**Author's Note:**

> I have written multiple attempts to describe the ambivalence people often have towards the small towns they grow up in and sometimes fear returning to. Floating World is the most notable of these attempts, but I’m not entirely happy with the way that one turned out. This story didn’t start out about that, but the more I wrote it, the more it gravitated towards that theme. Hopefully, this is ended up more successful. Also, this is just about nostalgia in a really general sense, and how more often than not, we don’t live up to the great expectations we have for ourselves. 
> 
> Although it’s lyrically about something totally different, you should listen to The Arcade Fire’s song “Intervention” while reading this, because it musically explains the tone I was going for, and it’s just this creepy, beautiful song and I absolutely love. 
> 
> I don’t own the affees, and I don’t own the title of this nor the song it was inspired by.

Jade didn’t have the slightest idea who it was for the first few seconds of the phone call. He had just gotten back from a coffee date with an old friend he’d sort of lost track of over the years, but it seemed like people didn’t come out of woodwork alone anymore, they brought friends. The phone rang. He rushed to the kitchen, answering it automatically without looking at the caller ID. 

“Hello?” he asked, pinning the receiver between his ear and shoulder. He didn’t know what he was expecting, but the voice on the other line was certainly not it. 

“Is this Jade Puget?” A horrible sound rasped, the voice of someone who’d smoked so many cigarettes in their lifetime that their throat was lined in ash, gravel and old lace. Jade was instantly perplexed, struggling through his meager list of contacts trying to figure out who this could be. 

“Um yes, whose this?” He answered, furrowing his brow. 

“Penny Marchand,” the voice scraped, and Jade forgot who he was for an instant. Before this moment he was Jade Puget, retailer by day, writer by night, Jack Keroac wannabe who desperately craved the traveler’s life, constantly homeward bound when here he was, selling shirts at Marshall’s and not selling books. He was mildly ashamed of his existence, sure, but he knew where he was. The realization that Penny Marchand was calling him on the phone, probably still from her favorite armchair in the living room made Jade forget everything. He was just a guy now, a skinny, awkward thirty-something standing in his kitchen holding this piece of plastic to his ear remembering things he tried to forget. The cooked-food and laundry detergent smell of the Marchand home, the back door. Saturday mornings, and basketball in the drive way, and broken collar bones and after school and...

“Penny,” he choked out, running a suddenly sweaty hand through his hair. His heart was pounding, chest tight. “What a surprise. How are you?” he asked finally.

“I’m dying.” Penny’s smoke and tar voice croaked, sounding like static on a broken TV set. 

“Oh...wow...I’m sorry,” Jade sputtered. “What from?” He asked stupidly. 

“Cancer,” Penny rasped bluntly. “Doctor says I have six months. I think he’s full of shit, but he told me to see people who are important to me. You’re important to me. So you should come on over, the place is still the same.” She sounded so old. Jade wasn’t shocked that Penny Marchand was dying, she always seemed like the type to go early, but he _was_ shocked that he of all people was important enough to be on the lady’s bucket list. He hadn’t seen, much less spoken to any member of the Marchand family in almost fifteen years. For all he knew, he was nothing but a kid Penny’s son used to hang out with.

“I’m living in southern California,” Jade explained lamely, mouth dry. 

“So?! Take a bus up. You only die once,” Penny said, cigarette-voice thin and exasperated. She coughed then, hacking on the other end of the line while Jade cringed. If he was going to take a Greyhound up to Ukiah, he needed to ask. He needed to know. He took a deep breath, feeling it resound deep in his stomach. 

“Um, how’s Dave? Is he there?” Jade asked through his teeth, hating himself for having to say those words to Penny Marchand. She coughed again, sighing. 

“Oh, he’s you know. He’s as fuckin’ crazy as ever. Actually, here, why don’t you talk to him?” Penny barked, and Jade listened helplessly while he heard her fumble with the phone. His stomach was wrenching frantically, and he realized how little he’d changed in fifteen years, how terrified of this thing he still was. 

“Hullo?” Davey’s voice was unmistakable, nasal and educated sounding at the same time, not a bit different from the last time Jade heard it. 

“Uh, hi,” he said stupidly, hand sweaty on the receiver. “Dave?” 

“Jade, hey. Long time no see.” Davey sighed then, another ghost coming out of the woodwork, knots and patterns and grain just becoming visible as layers of fifteen year of paint were chipped away. There were saturday mornings and basket ball games in the driveway, and skinned knees and after school projects. There were skateboard ramps homemade from the broken gate in the backyard, ditched high school dances and scraped elbows from sneaking in Davey’s window, the one by his bed. There were dirty sheets and that one shirt Jade lost because it was stuck between the mattress and the wall, and he left it there for so long just as an excuse to come back. But maybe he never did. 

“Are you living at home?” Jade asked, voice almost a whisper. 

“No, I’m living all over. But Mom really is on her deathbed now, so I’m here in Ukiah for awhile,” He explained, voice so terribly nonchalant compared to the way Jade could hardly speak, hardly breathe. “You really should come visit, it would mean a lot to her,” Davey added, and there was a note of quiet sadness to it. 

Jade didn’t know where he was again. He felt newly seventeen, hiding his first tattoo, done by a friend, under long sleeves even though it was almost Summer. He was sitting on the cement steps with Davey outside of the high school, so proud of his new car and his new ink, looking at the back of Davey’s head with this inexplicable thick feeling in his throat, and the sun is always out in California but it never seemed so goddamn bright before. 

“Of all the people, your mom wants to see me? I haven’t heard from her, or you, for almost fifteen years. It’s just kind of...strange...” Jade wondered what Davey was thinking right now, what he thought of Jade’s voice and what Jade was saying. He wondered if he was saying the right thing. 

“Well yeah,” Davey said like it made perfect sense. Jade could almost see him shrugging, this sixteen year old with a mop of too much hair and an oversized shirt. Jade forgot that Davey was around thirty too, now, even though he’d seen the occasional picture on someone’s Facebook, the awkward teenager replaced with a handsome, angular faced man. Jade hadn’t meant to keep tabs on what Davey was doing, it just kind of happened. “She loves me. And you were important to me, so therefore you’re important to her.” 

“Oh,” Jade said, at a loss for words. He thought of his schedule, of his predictably empty weekend. He wanted to say no. He really did, realizing for the hundredth time that fifteen years was on some days a whole lifetime, other days something as fresh as his week prior. As fresh as the scab on a new tattoo, that stupid tribal arm and that was now so faded and blue he’d touch it up if he had the money. He thought of Saturday mornings, or broken collar bones and dirty sheets. He raggedly inhaled, the air sucking into him sharp and bitter, balanced between the thing he told himself he’d never do and an apology unsaid. 

“Remind him you only die once!” He heard Penny shout from somewhere in the house, and the next day Jade found himself taking a few days off of work and buying a bus ticket, small, crumpled paper in his clenched shut hand. 

~*~

Penny Marchand’s home was exactly the same as he remembered it, cooked-food smell and Virginia Slims, only now there was an underlying smell of disease, yellow and cloying like medicine and sweets. Jade could smell bandaids and bactine, beneath all the casserole and cigarette smoke. Penny sat in her favorite arm chair, holding a fat and scruffy terrier dog under one arm while a butt smoked out in her ash tray, ever present despite the fact she had a tube of oxygen shoved up her age spotted nose. It was attached to a machine, and there was a ball that moved up and down as she breathed. Jade didn’t know what to do but stare at it, perched awkwardly on the couch in between an embroidered pillow and another fat dog, which was regarding him with two accusatory eyes, one of which was clouded with a cataract. The ball went up and down, in time with her weak inhalations. 

Jade didn’t know what he was doing there. 

“So, what have you been doing with your life?” Penny asked, oxygen ball rattling. She tapped ash off the butt, but didn’t inhale. Her dog sneezed. 

“Um, not a lot, I guess...” Jade started, trying to figure out how one summarizes fifteen years. He felt suffocated, crushed by the darkness of the room with its weak sunlight filtering in through dust-heavy blinds, the walls cluttered with picture frames and shelves full of useless knick knacks. He swallowed. “I went to school after I left Ukiah, finished four years at Berkeley before moving down south to LA county... I couldn’t afford grad school so I moved in with some friends and got a job. Started writing, and pretty much been doing that ever since,” he said, hating how fake and stupid and stale that sounded. He could have mustered a better, truer explanation, but it wasn’t the kind of thing you wanted to burden a dying woman with. 

“That’s it?” She barked. Three pairs of brown eyes bored into Jade, one human and hurting and sick, two feral and animal and cruel. They all reminded him of Davey’s eyes, the same skittering dark he remembered from Saturday mornings, and of course, Saturday nights. Dirty sheets. He swallowed again, mouth painfully dry, wondering when it would be appropriate to ask where Davey was. 

“Well, yeah,” he said awkwardly, heart clenching. He felt like a failure, but then again this was nothing new. 

“Never got married?” She asked. The oxygen ball went up and down, like Jade’s heart sliding around in his throat. 

“No, never met the right girl,” Jade said honestly, raking a hand through his hair like he always did when he was uneasy. Once again, that fraud feeling, the feeling that came from being capable of explaining further, but knowing it was better this way. _I haven’t loved someone in fifteen years_ would come out too loaded, and Jade didn’t want to kill Penny Marchand right here in her living room, six months early. 

“Hm,” She said thoughtfully, voice a train huffing up a steep hill, so much steel and oil grinding. At that moment the screen door bust open, a figure stepping in the commanding all the air in the room to suddenly direct its attention to him. Sunlight flooded in and Jade squinted pathetically. He knew exactly who it was, because only one person could control his environment like that, only one person could make the sun seem brighter. Jade’s stomach had never hurt so badly, not in fifteen years anyway. 

“So, the prodigal son returns,” Davey said in that unmistakable voice, standing in the doorjamb holding an armful of groceries, clearly, painfully, _glaringly_ no longer sixteen. 

He smiled at Jade, an odd, almost mocking smile. It didn’t meet his eyes, which were the same huge brown sadness that Jade remembered. He stared at Davey, thinking about that shirt he’d shoved between the bed and the wall, and wondering if it was still there. 

~*~

 

Penny told them to go catch up, go spend some time together. She was tired anyway. For the first time since he arrived in Ukiah, Jade wondered if Penny was really dying, or if this was some strange, elaborate plan to get Jade back in the hometown he so desperately wanted to leave when he was eighteen. Some elaborate plan to get him to talk to Davey, work this fifteen year old mess out he thought had been long since abandoned. Penny was coughing again, the oxygen ball hiccuping in its plastic tube. 

“You two go catch up. This old lady needs to sleep. Dave, will you go grab me the memory foam pillow from the bedroom?” She rasped, shifting her frail looking body in her favorite armchair. Davey nodded without responding, gesturing for Jade to follow him into the master bedroom at the end of the hall. Jade obeyed and padded after him like a dog, grateful for a reason to leave this sagging couch with it’s judgmental dog and sickly smell. 

He followed Davey down the hall, mesmerized by his broad shoulders and stocky frame. The Davey Jade had left behind in Ukiah had been bony, too many knees and elbows. This Davey was toned, well muscled with a tumble of long, dyed black hair that curled haphazardly and natural around his shoulders, arms completely tattooed a palette of bruise-purples and greens. Jade’s gut was a map full of knots, which tightened every time he remembered something else he’d spent fifteen years trying to forget. He never had, though, not really, because here he was with his head clouded by them, as vivid as they had been the days after they happened. This house was haunted with them. 

The disease smell was sharper in Penny’s room, just one breath away from being that wet, brown smell of decay. Jade’s eyes watered and he stayed a few steps behind Davey, who grabbed the pillow off the bed, hair falling down across his neck and sweeping the bedspread, but only just. “Remember when we almost fucked in this bed?” he stated clearly, standing up straight and fixing his eyes on Jade. 

Jade felt like he’d been punched. He wrote about sex sometimes, but it was always something he glossed over in his books, metaphor rich and un-graphic. It wasn’t like he thought explicit descriptions of sex were tasteless, he was just afraid of the words he’d be forced to use. Fuck was one of them. The way Davey so casually let it fall from his mouth hit Jade hard, slapping him wet and cold across the face like a spray of ice water. A dead fish. He thought of sex as _making love_ , not _fucking._ But of course, Davey was right. 

“Yeah,” he said, swallowing. “Yeah, I do.”

“We moved back to my bed because it was to weird,” Davey said nonchalantly, holding that pillow and staring down at the bed, like he was watching a sixteen year old version of himself rolling around with Jade there, not knowing what the fuck to do because they were kids and didn’t know enough or last long enough to really _fuck_ anyway. 

“Yeah,” Jade said again, shifting his weight back and forth and arranging himself like a bird rustling its feathers. “Dave. Is your mom really dying?” he blurted, needing to know what he’d fallen into, what he’d willingly paid round trip for. Davey was the one that looked startled then, mouth tensing. Jade noticed he still had the lip ring. He’d gotten that the year Jade left, only a few months before. 

“Of course she’s dying. Did you look at her?” Davey’s voice was harsh and Jade immediately felt stupid for even questioning that. 

“Sorry,” he said quietly, skin bristling as Davey walked past him, squeezing by his body at the door frame. Jade could smell him then, the shampoo on his hair, his cologne, spicy and fresh. 

“It’s fine. Here, let me put her to bed and then we can get out of the house. I want to show you how town’s changed,” he called from the living room, and because Jade did a terrible job of forgetting the things that happened in Penny Marchand’s house, he walked to the back door, knowing that was where Davey liked to leave from.   
~*~

Jade was nervous driving around Ukiah. Not just because he was sitting shotgun to Davey in his crappy silver Acura, (although that was a good part of it) but because he really _was_ a prodigal son of sorts. He was the oldest of the Puget brothers, the first to leave, and the only one to not come back at some point or another and make peace. He didn’t want people to see him and make a big deal, he didn’t want to be recognized. It was useless, though, because every face he saw he remembered from some crazy far away time, another life. 

“The Wheeler family is still around...Amanda is married. Has a few babies,” Davey said when they passed the Wheeler residence, his elbow hanging out the window, hair fluttering in the passing breeze. Jade was hiding behind his own hair, the carefully placed forelock that hung crisp and blonde in his eyes. 

“Really, Amanda Wheeler. I had the biggest crush on her in middle school,” Jade mused, fingers drumming on his knee. He kept on looking to his left, stealing glances at Davey’s face, taking careful note of its once-familiar topography, of the new lines framing his mouth, the creases near his eyes. They were smile and laugh lines, and Jade thought that if one was to age, aging from smiles and laughs was a good way to go. Jade still looked young, save for the bags under his eyes. He didn’t smile enough to leave anything there as a reminder. 

“Everyone did. She was beautiful, you know? She’s not anymore though. Got fat,” Davey laughed a little then, the lines blooming and folding and Jade’s breath caught. 

“There are a lot of people still around,” Davey continued, driving what Jade knew was the longest, windiest way into town, the way that cut through the poppy field and by the abandoned mill, hugging alongside the mosquito infested lake. “The Burnetts are still at the same place, all their kids stayed in the area. Ryan got married and he and his wife are living on this alternative energy compound place...everything’s solar powered. I have no idea how they did it, but it’s pretty fuckin’ cool. I checked it out on Saturday, I can take you by if you want,” Davey said. 

“No,” Jade answered sharply. The air smelled fragrant and allergic like pollen, floating and dreamlike and wet. Somebody had thrown a mattress out on the side of the sidewalk, water-spotted and mildewy, and Jade might have wrinkled his nose at it had he been looking out the window, but his eyes were fixed on the driver. Davey started next to him, flinching. 

“Oh come on Jade, we were good friends with Ryan in high school. I think you house sat for the Burnetts once,” Davey remembered, and that was one of the things Jade didn’t want to think about, staying alone at the Burnett’s house, drinking their wine and getting so dizzy, sprawled on the living room floor laughing, inviting Davey Marchand over because he had a whole house to himself, and he was the person he wanted to share that with most. He had been drunk and stupid, and he remembered looking so wide and open and exposed at Davey, their feet touching under a table, maybe, and Jade thinking that it was all okay. It was an okay thing to last forever. 

“What the hell am I supposed to say to Ryan Burnett? Hey, remember that time I stayed at your folks house and drank all their wine? Remember that one school play we had together? Things just don’t work like that.” Jade explained, slightly bitter tone to his voice. This was the longest thing he had said to Davey thus far, and something about that didn’t feel right. 

“People wonder what happened to you,” Davey said. “You never came back.” 

“Well yeah, I hated it here. The only think I wanted all through high school was to get the hell out. You remember, that was what we all wanted.” Jade explained, almost frantic. This was a confession, this was him trying to pay debts and make amends. This was getting close to an apology. 

“That was the only thing you wanted all through high school?” Davey responded, and his voice was biting, scathing. It cut right into Jade who shut up, feeling a finger of guilt worming its way up into his aorta. He looked down and Davey’s voice was softer when he spoke again. “Hey, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for it to come out that way.” 

“No, it’s okay. I was an asshole.” Jade admitted. This was a confession. This was getting close to an apology. 

“Just, can we not parade me around?” Jade begged.

“You really don’t want to see anyone, do you.” Davey said, a statement without question. 

“I don’t want to hear what people are gonna say. It’s been too long, you know?” Jade explained, rubbing at the back of his neck. He watched a pair of deer leap through someone’s yard, boxlike bodies suspended miraculously on those spindly legs. He knew the true reason he didn’t want to see people from his past wasn’t the shocked look, like they’d just seen a ghost. It wasn’t that. It was that he didn’t have jackshit to show for this dramatic departure from Ukiah, he didn’t have a an ounce of success to explain away his trip to college, his failure to return. If Jade was a bestselling author now, maybe he’d show his face around the Burnett’s again. Maybe if he’d done anything with his life he wouldn’t be so ashamed to be that ghost. 

“I didn’t think anything would get you back here. Funny it was Mom,” Davey shrugged, driving too slow around one big, sweeping curve in the road. Jade sighed, thinking, _it was you._

~*~  
Jade didn’t want to see town, so they ended up at one of their old haunts from force of long dead habit, this hidden spot under a bridge, overlooking the wash that ran through the outskirts of town. There was a flat spot you couldn’t see from the street, the perfect size for spreading out a blanket and listening to the sparse, small town traffic clatter over you. Davey and Jade used to go there all the time with friends, then much later just the two of them. 

When they got there, Jade didn’t say anything. He didn’t want Davey to make another comment, another _we almost fucked here,_ although the location was positively haunted with old memories, bright and technicolor and kaleidoscope fragmented. Davey pulled the Acura over, the tires making a nostalgic crunch in the roadside gravel as he parked.

“You remember this place?” Davey asked, trumping and sliding down the ivy covered hillside, slipping in his flat tennis shoes. He was wearing a V-neck white teeshirt, and Jade could see the hint of a red tattoo on his chest, slices of it visible every once in awhile as he shifted, outline ever present through the semi-translucent fabric. Jade wanted to ask him what it was, if he could see it. Instead he clumsily followed Davey down below the bridge, answering, “Of course.” His heart beat too fast, and his palms were damp. He thought of Penny Marchand and her Virginia Slims, her oxygen ball rattling like death. 

When they arrived it seemed smaller than Jade remembered, new graffiti of band names he’s never heard of scrawled red and angry across the fading ghosts of what he and his friends had left, fifteen years of rain and wind and dirt to wear them away. There was a scattering of broken beer bottles to the left, an empty condom wrapper. Some things never changed, he supposed. 

Davey sat down gingerly once he got there, collapsing on his back so his hair fanned out around him. Jade watched his chest rise and fall placidly for a few seconds, mind racing dangerously across all the things he used to do to him. All the places his mouth had been. It hurt so fucking badly to think about it, this wound so long unhealed and infected, to go poking at it with a clipping of barbed wire. Jade tore his eyes away, looking out across the view of the wash, a little trickle of grimy looking green water traveling down it’s middle like a jugular vein. 

This was the view Jade remembered from the day he smoked his first and last cigarette, coughing and sputtering while Davey laughed at him, Jade’s eyes streaming and cheeks flushed vivid red. This was the view Jade remembered from the day he kissed his first and last boy, the salty-newness of it sparking flint and timber in his lower stomach, the stupid clench of longing twisting his gut. This was the view Jade remembered from a million days, a million nights he snuck out to meet Davey, a blanket from his bed smuggled underneath his jacket. 

“So what have you been doing all this time?” Davey finally asked, sitting up. There was a scuff of dust all over his back, staining his white shirt a barely there red-brown. “It’s been a long time.”   
“I told your mom the abridged, edited for TV version,” Jade admitted, shifting backwards to he was sitting closer Davey. “That I left here and went to school, moved down south, got a job.” 

“What really happened?” Davey asked, laying back down again. Jade was painfully aware of the way their bodies were almost touching, an electric centimeter or two between their arms, both prickled with gooseflesh. He could smell the green, spicy smell of Bearclover growing in clumps alongside the wash, and the scent brought him back so hard, thundering right back down into his eighteen year old mindset, so scared of himself, wanting so badly to get the hell out, get to the city. 

“Well...” Jade swallowed, cocking his head. He hooked his thumb in his belt loop, the fraying one he always worried at with his fingers when he didn’t know what to say. “I did go to school. But I dropped out at the end of my third year,” Jade said, shocked at how easy it was to tell this to Davey. This was a confession. Getting close to an apology. 

The silence was tense and pregnant between them, and Jade imagined Davey’s reaction, the raising eyebrows, so dark and thick and brooding. “Oh,” he finally responded, wordless. “Why?” 

“I failed my classes.” Jade explained. This thing was usually impossible to talk about. Jade had always been defined as _college bound_ , so smart and motivated and full of promise. The head of his class, the one with the biggest, brightest dream of getting out. 

“I never knew that,” Davey said softly, and Jade looked down at his hands, clenched and narrow and white on his chest. 

“Yeah. I went a little crazy after that, spending all my money and pretending it hadn’t happened. I was so ashamed. A friend took me in eventually, made me get a job and get my shit together, and now I just sort of live day to day. I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m okay with that.” Jade said this firmly, defiantly. The last part was a lie, and he was pretty sure Davey knew it, by the sad little smile that twitched across his mouth. 

“Is that why you never came back? You thought you’d let everyone down?” Davey asked, and Jade didn’t want to talk anymore so he just nodded, staring at the cement they were sitting on, watching a trail of ants parade prudently along the edge of it, heading single-file and organized to their hill. 

“You know, I wouldn’t have cared.” Davey said gently, and Jade’s throat was suddenly so thick as he swallowed, again and again and again, trying to make the thickness go down. He wanted it to sink heavy and lonely in his stomach, not threaten to choke him like this. “I know.” he managed to say, his voice alarmingly thin and reedy. 

“How come you never visited? You were only at Berkeley...it wasn’t that far away. You just dropped off the map.” Davey asked, and he sounded vulnerable. Instead of making Jade feel stronger or in solidarity with him, it just made his stomach hurt, made him more nervous. 

“I hated it here Dave, you knew that. I wanted to get as far away as possible and never come back, make a new name for myself,” Jade explained, this was another dose of apple pie, another placebo. The truth of the matter was that Jade had been fucking terrified of himself, of who he was and _what_ he was and what Davey made him realize about that. He hadn’t been ready for it at eighteen, and he ran. 

“You know,” Davey said quickly, eyes downcast and mouth a hard line that told Jade this was a confession. “You know, I was so young when you left. I realize now this wasn’t the case but at sixteen, man, I thought it was about me. I thought you were leaving so hard because of me. I thought it was my fault.” His voice cracked ever so slightly over the word _fault._

“It wasn’t,” Jade said plaintively, heart hammering so hard a flush was creeping up his neck, tainting him. “God Dave, it wasn’t. It was never about you it was always about me. I was fuckin’ so stupid.” He said awkwardly, words falling over and tumbling like an intricate pattern of dominoes now reduced to a mess. Jade thought of skinned elbows and knees, of basketball and after school. It all came rushing into and out of him, a tide of things he thought he would never have to think about again, because he’d never stopped running. But here he was, in Ukiah, sitting under the bridge with Davey Marchand while Penny died and her oxygen ball moved up and down a limited number of times. 

This was another confession. 

“I know, I know that now. But Jade...god, Jade, I was sixteen. I’d never dealt with that shit before. It would have made all the difference in the world to me if you had come back and visited, just once. Or if that was too much, you could have called. I know now that it wasn’t about me, but I didn’t know that at sixteen, or eighteen or even twenty. I _hated_ myself. I thought it was all my fault. You could have saved me from that,” Davey said, the entire huge thing rushing out beside himself, his eyes shocked and wide and angry like he hadn’t meant to say it. Maybe Davey Marchand was able to make the sun and the air do shit around Jade, but the raw, young sound of his voice spoke volumes about how much that thing that happened fifteen years ago had wounded him. 

“I’m... I’m sorry,” was all Jade could say dumbly, and this was a apology. This was all Jade could muster in the way of an apology, a simple _I’m sorry_ when he just up and left the one person who made Ukiah worth living in, the one person who changed his life and showed him more about himself than anyone else ever had. More than school, more than dropping out of school. More than fifteen years of folks coming in and out and maybe bruising once or twice, but never leaving a scar. 

The wash trickled, making a wet, babbling sound like a little kid who couldn’t talk, just sucking sloppily and drooling all over its rattle. There was this sound, this and the cars slamming by above them, this and birds and wind ripping through the ivy and bearclover. Jade listened hard, wishing he knew what to say. 

“Yeah, I bet you are,” Davey said quietly, voice more sad than angry. “You fucked me up real bad you know. It was so long ago, but that stuff still stings sometimes.” he said this to himself as well as Jade, looking absently off into the oblique. Jade allowed himself to study Davey’s face, the long, angled sharpness of his jaw, the impossible straight line of his nose, the mole to the right of his mouth, still soft for all its peaked angles. Jade could see the sixteen year old he’d once loved in that face, soft-cheeked and skinny and stupid just like Jade had been. He wanted to kiss Davey Marchand, bring their lips together and take back fifteen years of mistakes. This was a confession. 

“I was so scared,” he admitted. Another confession. 

“Yeah, well so was I,” Davey said defiantly, turning to look at Jade with an endless exhaustion in his eyes. He inhaled deeply, twitching eyelids sweeping down to the dark curve of his lashes brushed his cheek. They fluttered open again, and he said, “I’m sorry. I know you didn’t come up here to listen to me call you out on being an asshole when you were eighteen. I really have forgiven you, I know you weren’t trying to break my heart or anything.” 

“It’s okay. I was a dick. And I did come up here to apologize,” Jade said gently, embarrassed. “So, you know about how royally I messed up my life, I want to hear what you did with yours,” He asked. Davey looked away, gazing out over the wash with its sludgy waters.

“Well,” he started, smiling privately to himself, mouth opening wordlessly then closing again. Jade recognized the look, the _how do I begin to explain fifteen years to some one?_ “I went to school. Graduated, got a degree in english but what the fuck do you do that, you know? So I just kind of started living places with different people doing different things. I had no fuckin’ money, so it became a barter system. One friend did tattoos, so I built his back house, he did my sleeves. I irrigated this guy’s property, and he made me a shit ton of soup to freeze. I ate soup for like, a whole year...” Davey explained, rattling on. Jade stared at him, mouth parted. He wondered if Davey was making this shit up, he had always been good at lying, at telling stories. 

“Yeah...then in 2000 my friend from school overdosed, and I was really fucked up over it. I claimed edge after that...” Davey help up his arm, pointing to the inside of his bicep where a pair of praying hands was inked in blue and black, thick X’s on them. “I was so serious about it at first, me and this girl started traveling around slashing the tires of booze-shipping trucks and whatnot. We almost got arrested in Indiana, though, so I quit. Then I moved back to California, and worked in San Francisco doing different jobs. Lived with a bunch of punks in bands in this dirty as fuck house. It had the lowest rent though, I was mostly broke. You know, guerilla straightedge warfare doesn’t pay all that well or anything.” Davey joked, bringing his legs up to sit loosely cross legged. He was wearing black canvas tennis shoes, which were all scuffed up from dirt. They looked nearly identical to the ones they both wore in highschool, save for the lack of childish handwriting, band names and curse words in sharpie, poorly drawn logos and rudimentary penises. 

“Are you making all this up?” Jade asked, incredulous. Davey’s eyes widened. 

“No. This is the honest to god truth. It just took me a long time to grow up, I guess,” he shrugged, and Jade thought that _long time to grow up_ wasn’t what he was thinking. More like _what I wish I’d done. What I write books about._

“Wow,” was what he said in response, rubbing at a rip he didn’t know he had in the knee of his jeans. “I don’t know what else to say. I admire you, though. You did a hell of a lot more in fifteen years than I did,” He admitted. 

“That’s a matter of opinion,” Davey shrugged again, exhaling a labored breath. “A lot of people would say I hadn’t done anything at all.” He smiled then, licking his lips in this awful way that made Jade’s heart flip flop, made him think about after school and wine at the Burnetts and almost fucking on Penny Marchand’s bed. It made him think about what she said about only dying once, and how that was a lie. You could die a million times, you could die every day and live like a fucking dead man, in retail, dropping out of your dream because you were afraid of yourself. You could die over and over, but you only lived once, and Jade wasn’t doing that. He was living as a deadman. 

“I think you did a great job.” Jade said, pocketing a green fragment of glass from a broken Heineken bottle to remember this place by, seeing as this was probably the last time he’d ever see it. 

~*~ 

Davey and Jade were by the car when it happened. Davey realized upon walking back that his shirt had gotten filthy, and he pulled it over his head and discarded it, tossing the wadded ball of fabric into the back seat. Jade was silenced immediately, the expanse of Davey’s back a far cry from the skinny white thing he’d dug his nails into so many nights on those dirty sheets all those tears ago. It rippled with muscle just under a layer of heavily inked skin, a pair of detailed black angel’s wings scooping down below the hem of his pants. Jade was suddenly dumb and stupid, staring. 

He remembered the first time he kissed Davey, after school and after basketball, as the day was cooling down as the sun dropped below the horizon. They were under the bridge, laying side by side and listing all the cars named after animals. Impala, Pinto, Spider, Ram. It was between the Mustang and the Cougar that Jade did it, just propped himself up on his elbow and caught Davey’s heart-shaped mouth in his own, clumsy and messy but his blood had never thundered that way before. And if he knew then that it never would again, he might not have split for the hills a year later, so scared of what he’d done that night and what he hadn’t been able to stop doing until he forcibly removed himself from the town it happened in. 

Davey had been fifteen then, this young reckless thing that wasn’t scared of shit, not of Jade and not of himself. He said it took him a long time to grow up, but Jade knew the truth. 

Jade hadn’t come back to Ukiah in fifteen years, because of this. 

“I like your wings,” He had said stupidly, and Davey turned around, revealing in full the flaming heart on his sternum. Everything was so bright it hurt to look at, like the sun had been when Jade was seventeen. “Yeah? I thought you might. It’s to remind people that I’m not an angel.” 

And Jade hadn’t come back to Ukiah because as he and Davey regarded each other with a loaded intensity, Jade didn’t think to stop himself from closing that space between them, putting his burning hands on the smooth, exposed skin of Davey’s waist and kissing him long and hard and deep, in the middle of the goddamn road for everyone to see. 

Davey let him, sighing a little as Jade mauled his lips, pressing their bodies flush and backing Davey up against the side of the car, flattening Davey’s wings between the window and his scapulas. His blood thundered in his veins, as hard as ever, and he was confused and sick and falling because he used to love Davey, but he didn’t even know him anymore. 

He pulled away gasping, leaving Davey’s mouth red and swollen and open, so wet and full of all the memories of things it had done to other places on his body. Davey’s eyes were calculatedly dark, a prudent, contained breed of wild just under the glassy surface, like a newly broke horse one couldn’t quite ride yet. Jade looked hard at him, tried to find and hold the sixteen year old buried under all those layers of tattooed skin. He found him, bleeding and lonely. 

“I was so fucking in love with you,” Jade said brokenly, eyes blown wide and black. And that was a confession. That was more of an apology than _I’m sorry_ would ever be. 

~*~

Back at Penny Marchand’s house, Jade resumed his position on the couch, throat clogged with Virginia Slim smoke as he watched her alternate between a cigarette and a glass of lemonade, each drooping in her tired hand. He kept expecting her to either spill the drink or burn the arm of her chair with the butt of the cigarette. “You have a good time with my son?” She asked, head cocked and graying brown hair falling in fuzzy, dismantled curls around her shoulders. Jade didn’t know how to respond to that, so he just nodded, playing with the seam of his pants. Davey had disappeared off to some room in the house Jade could only imagine as soon as they walked in the door, slipping out from under his radar and leaving Jade to sit alone again, across from Penny watching her oxygen ball move up and down. 

“I knew you would. You meant a lot to him, you know,” She croaked out, eyes looking impossibly deep set and dark. He thought her sagging mouth might have attempted to smile, but he couldn’t be sure. 

“We were good friends,” Jade said quietly, fingers long and hesitant on his own leg. He drummed them there, hammering out some piano solo he didn’t remember, since he hadn’t taken piano lessons in so many years. Over fifteen, the more he thought about it. 

“Thanks for coming back. Dave...he didn’t think you would. I told him that you better. Seeing as I’ve only got six months, if I believe that bullshit doctor.” 

Jade’s gut flip-flopped for no reason at all, his vision going slightly blurry for a split second. Penny was dying, and he wondered if she’d dropped out of school and ran from everything she ever built and burned down, like him, or if she was the one who taught her son to slash tires and live day to day. 

“Did you do everything you wanted to do?” Jade asked, voice oddly crushed. 

“Everything? No one can do everything.” Penny explained, struggling to lift her age-weathered hand, gnarled and brown even though she wasn’t quite old enough to be so decrepit. “But they can try.” She added, attempting to half smile again. 

“Did you try?” He asked her. She sighed laboriously, eyes skittering to gaze at the wall contemplatively. 

“I did. But only after a doctor told me I had six months. Maybe you should pretend someone told you six months, and start trying now. Maybe you can fit more in than I did.” Penny said, voice quiet. 

And Jade nodded thoughtfully, musing that perhaps in so many words Davey had told him he had six months to get his shit together. That his life wasn’t going to start without him starting it first, that Jade was getting older and people as young as Penny died, died fast. Jade looked hard at Penny, swallowing. “You should be proud of Davey, you know.” He said. He stopped before he started gushing, before words fell out of him like blood pouring from a fatal wound. He wanted to say, _He’s done so much, he’s living so hard, he’s really, really great. He’s still the only person I ever..._

Penny might have known all that, though. She nodded to Jade, cocking her head. “Oh don’t you worry about that. I’m very proud of him. You know, I don’t think he’d be where he is today if it hadn’t been for you though, kid. You really inspired him, made him want to get out and make something of his life just like you did.” She smiled fondly, but Jade’s gut dropped out from under him, his footing suddenly lost. 

She was right that Davey was who he was because of Jade, in some respect. But Jade was pretty sure it wasn’t because he inspired Davey, but because he broke his heart. He resigned to the truth in this, simultaneously glad he had in some way touched Davey and ashamed that it was because he hurt him. “Thanks,” He said quietly to Penny. 

Davey came back in the living room at that moment then, holding two perspiring, mismatched glasses of lemonade in his hands. He set one (the bigger one) down on the coffee table in front of Jade, smiling in this strange, hard-to-pin-down way. Jade took it, sighing gratefully. “Sit down?” He asked Davey from force of habit, but he just shook his head, fondling the hem of the navy blue tee shirt he’d just changed into. “I’m a stander.” 

Jade felt stuck, poised between these two woodwork ghosts without anything else to say. He didn’t want to go home to his retail and novels, but he didn’t want to stay here, no longer in love with Davey and confused as fuck about ten million other things while Penny breathed her last breaths. He didn’t know what he wanted. He thought about himself at eighteen, and what if his life would be different now if he hadn’t run so far, so fast. If he’d know the band logo on Davey’s tee shirt, if he’d like them, too. If he’d be living where he was, or if he would have traveled to Indiana to slash tires and build houses. If he’d be alone, or if he’d know the location of every single one of Davey’s new tattoos, with his hands as well as his mouth. 

He wondered, but really, he couldn’t know. “I should be going, you know.” He told more to Penny than Davey. “I have to check into the motel before it gets too late, but I gotta walk into town” He added stupidly, standing up on awkward, stiff legs. Penny nodded, taking a long, pained drag off of her cigarette. “Come say good bye tomorrow before you leave. And you better come back for the funeral, Jade Puget. I’ll be one pissed off old lady if you don’t.” She rasped, and Jade agreed although both he and Davey weren’t so sure about his promises anymore. 

“Hey, before you go I have something of yours from way back,” Davey said. It came out like he was trying to make it sound nonchalant, but his words were touched with a quiet but rushed kind of sadness, nearing something that might have been desperation if he was younger. Jade’s heart leapt. “Yeah, yeah sure,” he responded, following Davey back into the room that used to be Davey’s when they were kids, but was now a guest room. 

Davey might have been a stander in most circumstances, but he sat gingerly on the edge of the bed for this one, next to a carefully folded white shirt, which he handed unceremoniously to Jade. “I don’t know if you wanted this, but when I was packing up to go to school,I found it between the mattress and the bed. It’s a shirt of yours. I kept it for a long time, but I think it’s time I give it back...I swore if I ever saw you...” he trailed off awkwardly, face coloring slightly. “Sorry, I sound fucking dumb.” He shrugged, face coloring in a way that reminded Jade of basketball in the driveway after school, of kissing under the bridge. 

Jade took the shirt from him, staring at it and unfolding it. It was white and oversized, some band he didn’t even like anymore’s album artwork faded and cracked on the front from being worn so frequently by eighteen year old Jade. “Thank you so much,” He said to Davey, and he was the one who sounded desperate now, this breed of overwhelmingly ernest sincerity soaking his words through. 

He remembered lying next to Davey on this same narrow bed, cramped and warm and elbows and knees touching in all the right places. He remembered basketball games after school and tripping on the uneven pavement on Davey’s driveway, he remembered the searing pain in his collar bone, the imperfect way it healed because he refused to go to the doctor in effort to appear tough to Davey. He remembered leaving because he knew that if he didn’t, he never would, because it was the best thing he’t ever felt. He remembered wanting, _needing_ time to sort himself out, get his head together away from Davey so he could figure out how to survive this. He remembered shoving this shirt, a favorite of his, in the crack to remind himself that he owed it to Davey to come back. 

Davey and Jade regarded each other, Davey seated uneasily on the bed, Jade standing and holding the wadded ball of cotton and wanting so badly to bury his face in it, hoping in vain it would still smell like Davey’s sixteen-year-old self, his bed and his dirty sheets and boy sweat. Thirty-year-old Davey looked almost expectant right now, and Jade wondered if he wanted him to kiss him. Jade wondered if he wanted to. 

“I can give you a ride into town, if you need it,” Davey said lamely, but Jade knew the offer was empty, and best left alone. He wanted to say yes, but he shook his head. “I really should walk.” 

“I know,” Davey said sadly, eyes full and wet and watery and young looking, mouth this constantly moving line. Jade did want it then, did want to align his own lips to that place he burnt, that place he remembered. 

Instead, he clutched the shirt to his chest and said, “I’ll see you around, right?” to Davey, who’s eyes broke a little before hardening again, then dropping to the worn carpet. “Yeah, yeah of course. Thanks for making it to see mom.” The collar of his shirt dropped just enough to reveal a glimpse of crimson from his heart, and then it was gone. 

Jade nodded to him, an empty sensation sinking beneath his lungs as he left through the back door like Davey always used to, thinking about what it would be like to see the entirety of that heart and draw it from memory.


End file.
